


Vanities

by epersonae



Series: The Time Between [5]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Foreshadowing? Probably, Pining, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Tumblr Prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 19:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17607518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epersonae/pseuds/epersonae
Summary: Lucretia is worrying about time and age. Maureen is working on something secret.





	Vanities

Lucretia stares in the mirror, touching the corners of her eyes, touching her mouth, and she sighs. The soft exhalation fills the quiet room.

Maureen glances up, snapping the compact closed, tucking one colored pencil behind her ear, picking up another and tapping it against the rolled-out parchment on the table.

“What’s up?” she asks, although she’s seen Lucretia do this before: look at herself in the mirror as if she’d been replaced by a stranger. She deliberately keeps her voice light.

“Time is such a strange thing,” Lucretia replies. “Doesn’t it ever bother you?”

Maureen twirls the pencil between her fingers; with her other hand, she traces lines on the page, her fingertips come to rest on one of the discs of the Cosmoscope, dark blue cross-hatching filling the circle.

“Sometimes I think of Lucas as just a little boy,” she murmurs, “and then I remember all at once, that he’s about grown, and it’s like—” She waves the hand with the pencil. “But you know, that’s just what it is.”

As Lucretia turns around, she rolls up the schematic for the cosmoscope and smooths out the plans for the lab hidden beneath it. Lucretia sits across from her, a little furrow between her brows as she looks at the blueprint, her own hand tracing the shape of spaces yet to be.

Maureen continues, “If we’re lucky, we make something that lives on, that makes the world...better?”

“Like your father and Upsy?” says Lucretia with an arched brow, that small quirk of a smile.

“Listen,” Maureen replies, and then lets the silence go on until she’s gotten a laugh out of Lucretia.

“I know, I know,” Lucretia finally says, “it’s only that….” She shakes her head, leaving the thought unfinished. Again, that small rueful smile. “I suppose I’m just being vain,” she says, looking at her hand, turning it under the lamplight.

Maureen considers taking Lucretia’s hand and holding it tight. Instead she chews on her pencil, tries not to stare at Lucretia’s long elegant fingers or her thoughtful grey eyes, and murmurs, “No, no. No, not at all.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is so short it almost seemed not worth posting, but I do still love writing these little bits, and tumblr is a nightmare for finding things, so here we are. Many thanks to Micah for the prompt: things you don’t like about yourself that I do.


End file.
